What I've Been Reading

Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age by Steven Johnson. We are a social species, we thrive and benefit mutually because of our social interactions - this has been a recurring theme of Steven Johnson's books. I am a big fan of his books and of-course E.O.Wilson must be smiling!!

• Sullenberger was in command of the aircraft as he steered it toward the Hudson, but the fly-by-wire system was silently working alongside him throughout, setting the boundaries or optimal targets for his actions. That extraordinary landing was a kind of duet between a single human being at the helm of the aircraft and the embedded knowledge of the thousands of human beings that had collaborated over the years to build the Airbus A320’ s fly-by-wire technology.
• There is nothing intrinsic to the peer-progressive worldview that says social problems can be wished away with some kind of magical Internet spell. For starters, many peer networks do not involve the Internet at all. (Think of the Sternins’ search for positive deviance in the peer networks of rural Vietnam.) While the design of the Internet embodies most peer-progressive principles, its powers can be easily exploited by top-down, hierarchical organizations. The Internet makes it easier to build peer-based solutions to social problems, but it does not make them inevitable.
• Put another way, “market failures” are not just the twenty-year storms of major recessions or bank implosions. Markets are constantly failing all around us. The question is what you do when those failures happen. The pure libertarian response is to shrug and say, “That’s life. A market failure will still be better in the long run than a big government fiasco.” The traditional liberal response is to attack the problem with a top-down government intervention. The Right says, in effect, “Read your Hayek.” The Left sets about to build a Legrand Star. The peer-progressive response differs from both these approaches. Instead of turning a blind eye to market failures, it assumes that these problems are widespread, and actively seeks them out as the central focus of its agenda. Instead of building a large government agency to combat the problem, it tries to build a peer network around it, a system of dense, diverse, and decentralized exchange. Sometimes these interventions are supported by government funding; sometimes they are supported by charitable contributions; sometimes they involve Wikipedia-style contributions of free labor; sometimes they draw resources from private markets in creative new ways. In effect, they create Hayek-compatible solutions in the blank spots that the market has overlooked.
• The libertarian looks at Kickstarter and says, “Great, now we can do away with the NEA.” The peer progressive says, “Now we can make the NEA look more like Kickstarter.”
• “The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order,” Hayek wrote, “is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” Billions of dollars were spent by private companies trying to build global networks based on proprietary standards: AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, Microsoft, Apple, and many others made epic efforts to become mainstream consumer networks in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They were all defeated by a set of networking standards— TCP/ IP, the e-mail protocols of POP and SMTP, and the Web standards of HTML and HTTP— that were effectively public property: collectively developed and owned by no one, or by everyone. This was the stunning coda to Hayek’s career: he won a Nobel Prize by explaining how markets shared information much more effectively than centralized states, but when it came time to build a global system for sharing information, the ultimate solution came from outside the marketplace.